Keylogger Comparisons

I was reading an article on how to use your GPU to crack passwords. There was an advertisement on that site for the "Top 10 Keyloggers of 2012". I could not help myself. I had to check out that list. Five different products were listed and compared. I wondered whether this site was just an advertisement for the product listed in the to position. I decided to do some research on the products listed.

Let's talk about cost. IamBigBrother comes in at the bottom for $29.99. Next is SpyAgent at $69.95. Then WebWatcher and Spector Pro go for $97.00 and $99.95 respectively. I did not consider Content Protect in any comparisons since it does not seem to really be a keylogger.

Next let's look at awards. WebWatcher and Spector Pro were PC Magazine editor's choices. I don't know whether the editor's choice award is worth anything. But I do know and somewhat trust PC Magazine. SpyAgent is allegedly ranked number 1 with KeyLogger.org. Sounds legit.

How about what I actually get, and what upgrades come with the product? Specto Pro claims unlimited upgrades. That just sounds suspicious. SpyAgent will ship you a CD-ROM, provide 1 year of free major upgrades, and free minor upgrades. That sounds like a very legit type of upgrade. WebWatcher had a shaky option of seeling you a 1 year reinstall capability for downloaded. It costs an extra %9.95. That's just a fail.

Spector Pro takes 5 minutes to install. SpyAgent claims to install in under 1 minutes. Advantage SpyAgent. SpyAgent also touts its help documentation and lifetime support. You can't count those nice extras out. IamBigBrother provides a free trial. Sounds good. I am almost tempted to try out a free trial myself.

Anatomy of a Keylogger

I read this insane article about how a hacker figured out the antics of a keylogger. You should read the whole account over on Spiderlabs. The main breakthrough was when he downloaded and ran the malware in a safe environment. This allowed him to track the rogue program connecting to an FTP server. He spied on the net traffic to discover the username and password the malware used to FTP things up to the owner's server.

That is when the real ownage began. He was able to log into the FTP server and search around. Further tracking involved finding out the license used for a commercial keylogging app, and typing that back to a real person's name. Oh this is so cool. This just goes to show you that when you have the right skills, you can figure all kinds of things out.

I am just curious why the guy did not play any tricks on the keylogger. If you got access to their site, you could reverse the roles and hijack the script kiddies.

Building a Bot

I have been surveying a bunch of iPhone apps recently. There goes my monthly data charges. Previously I had heard about this game Bejeweled. But I never tried it out until now. The thing is very fun. I have the version called Bejeweled Blitz. Recently I read a tutorial on how to build a bot to win at Bejeweled. Winning means scoring a whole lot of points I guess.

The first decision to make in building the bot is choice of language. Personally I would use C or C++. However the example bot I saw was built with AutoIt. This is a language from Microsoft for creating macros for automation. I think the syntax of AutoIt is kind of like Visual BASIC.

Once you have chosen a language, you need to be able to read Bejewled icons on the screen. Before that you got to figure out the coordinates of the upper right hand corner of the window. Then you must determine the spacing of the icons in the Bejeweled window. The smart breakthrough was to figure out the location on an icon you can test to determine its color.

So far we have been dealing with the easy stuff. Next you need to come up with some Artificial Intelligence to choose the best icons to swap in order to maximize Bejeweled profits. Personally I think you should first swap icons near the top of the screen to ensure the bottom opporunities do not get shifted. However if the bot is considering all possibilities, it should look for longer combos and perhaps double combos.

Bejeweled is so fun that I might just have to try writing a bot to play it for me. The easiest way to do this would probably be to get a version of Bejeweled running on my PC where I have better control of the environment.

Demoscene Alive and Well

I have been watching videos of some 2012 demoscene entries. A lot of them were great. However two of them really stole the show. In fact, they won their respective contests. These are 64kb entries. That is, the code fits in 64kb of memory. They do a lot with a little.

First up is Proton-K by Kewlers. They got a rocket flying out in outer space. The beginning could be a scene right out of Star Wars. I like how the camera rotates around the rocket, causing the light from the sun to be briefly eclipsed. There are some neat effects on the rocket's surface as some weird energy light balls pass through the rocket.

Next up is Gaia Machina by Approximate. I love the scene where the wind blows on the windmill and grass. Hot graphics to say the least. Some weird alien looking legs move through the nature scene. Then just when you thought you had seen it all, the strawberries light up. Freaky good.

Sometimes when I am creating an intro scene for one of my apps, I feel like I am a demoscene participant. I got to make a lot happen in a small amount of time with little code.

Wallhacks and Other Game Cheats

I read an intro article on hacking games via DirectX over at AltDevBlogADay. The essence of the techinques is to intercept the game calls to the DirectX API. Then you can substitute your own evil code in there. The most common of such hacks is the wallhack.

For the wallhack, you wait until a call is made to DirectX with the enemy's position. Then you literally draw a wall around them on the screen. I guess that traps the enemy in the wall. They can't get you or shoot you. Pwned.

Another hack you can do with an enemy location is to draw them a different color. For example, you could highlight all the bad guys in red. This will allow you to visually detect them easier, and shoot them up. Now doing things such as this might get you noticed. And if the game cops catch you, you might be banned. So you need to be sneaky. But that is a story for a future post.

Making Wordpress Fast

I read a detailed account on Ewan's blog on how to set up Worpress to handle 10M hits a day for minimal cost. Part of the instructions are installing software you need for any Wordpress setup: Ubuntu, MySQL, PHP, and Wordpress itself. What is the meat behind the speedup trick? Well it appears to be a combination of some products to accelerate Wordpress usage.

You want to have Nginx for high performance HTTP to start with. Then you add in Varnish, which is an HTTP accelerator. Varnish puts stuff in virtual memory and uses threads to speed things up. Then you add the W3 Total Cache plugin to Wordpress. It uses compression, and as the name implies, caching to really speed things up. It claims to increase the Wordpress throughput a massive 10 times.

One fact I found interesting was the use of Blitz to measure the speed gains. Blitz simulates a lot of users downloading pages from you web site. This all seems the domain of a skilled system adminstrator working on a shoestring budget.

Keygen Details

A rogue virus made it so that I needed to restore my computer to factory settings. I am still reinstalling all my apps. One of the apps kept complaining about a registration key. I ignored it for a while, but it was annoying. So I broke out a key generator.

The main thing of interest with the keygen is that it required me to put in my name. It appears the key is somehow tied to the name. Go figure. The authors of the key generator were able to detect this dependency and add it to their programs.

Can anyone decipher the foreign characters in the image I posted? I am assuming it means cool key generator.